When she got indoors, marvelling still at the possession of her own key to the place, locking the door behind her as instructed, she shouted for Jones.
Jones was in the cellar. She could hear banging.
They were getting on well, Jones and she. No silly business, no touching up. Just like having an uncle or a grandad, only one who never criticised. He praised her instead; ever so keen on the way she worked. He’d say things like, my word, Peg, look what you’ve done, you’re a right grafter, you are. Where’d you learn to polish like that, Peg? My mum, Peg said. She was a cleaner. Ah, Jones said, that’s what you and Di got in common, her mum was too. That boggled the imagination, but it did explain something. If you got to live in a place like this purely for the price of cleaning it, life had all sorts of possibilities. Did the man who owned it give her mum the house or what? The truth was, that although Peg liked Di, big time, and was curious about her, Di was a bit scary and she didn’t really want to know too many details of her life history, not yet, except perhaps the romantic bits, not until she’d proved herself. It was Jones she wanted to impress. It was Jones who was going to save her from her own sense of shame and realise she wasn’t really that bad, despite what she’d done and that fucking warrant for her arrest: Jones who would say it’s OK to skip bail, I’ll hide you, ’cos Jones knew the inside of prison, too.
The encounter with Monica had upset her more than the walk home in the rising wind, and she went over it in her mind. Lovely short hair from a nasty hairdresser who thought she was a thief, asking her about the clothes, for shit’s sake, making her sign a register, and yes, she had signed her full name, never mind. And then someone following her home, and the house beginning to rattle and make noises in the north easterly wind she had heard about. It was Jones she needed and Jones was in the cellar, yelling up from the other end of those creepy stairs, telling her to come down. She obeyed.
Never liked cellars, or basements, for that matter. When Peg got her own place, it was going to be on the sixteenth floor, with windows on all sides. She did love heights, even though living in a fourth floor flat with a stepfamily had proved to be a nightmare. She wanted to tell Jones about that: she wanted Jones to know about her life. Jones was a person you told things, but Jones was preoccupied, banging around down here. That worried her. He wouldn’t be doing that if Di was here, she knew it. Di never said that anything, any room, any corner, was off limits, not even her bathroom, but Peg had the feeling that the cellar was. She herself had once looked round the door and gone no further. It was just too big and she had to confess she had never been down a cellar before, except in a pub and then it was small.
‘What are you doing?’ she said.
‘Testing, just testing. Ah, I see what he did. Bricked off the far room to keep out the sea and left the door.’
Peg smelled the smell of the place, surprisingly warm for being underground, like being in a Tube station on a cold day. Good enough for storage, things wrapped in canvas, more bloody pictures perhaps, as if there weren’t enough. Jones was looking at the table in front of the door, a nice thing, wasted down here. He’d been banging at the walls, installing something small on a hook, and his face gleamed with sweat and she had to admit she had seen him looking nicer.
‘Look at that,’ he said. ‘Look at this ceiling.’
She looked. The ceiling was arched and the arch disappeared into the wall. The brick above her eyes was old and rust-coloured while the wall was proper red. The graceful brick arch of an old wine cellar ceiling was abruptly cut in two. Yeah, she could see that. So what?
‘Wasn’t like that when I came to school here,’ Jones said. ‘Beautiful ceiling when you could see it all. We used to come down here to smoke. I guess he tanked it up against the water coming in, gave up with the front bit. Shame, spoils the ceiling.’
He turned on Peg, his face illuminated by the overhead light. There was enough light in here for an interrogation room. His face was haunted and she didn’t know why. There was a creeping, whispering sound, as if of someone breathing. You could hear the sea down here, and she didn’t like that, either.
‘That’s where the sea got in, on that side,’ Jones was saying, talking more to himself than to her. ‘Nineteen eighty-seven, famous flood that was. They seem to happen about every dozen years or so. The water creeps in underground with a high tide and the north easterlies. A boy almost drowned in the back cellar, hiding down here. You can’t keep the sea out, you can only contain it. Houses are high, this end, but it comes in, under the sand.’
She shivered.
‘Come on upstairs,’ she said. ‘I got us a bottle of wine.’
He shook himself.
‘Di left us plenty of wine, but it was nice of you to think of buying some, pet.’
He was tidying up, piling old crockery on to a table.
‘Mustn’t fiddle with what they kept down here. Blimey, what a waste. But I fixed the camera, like Saul said. Hope I got it right.’
Jones shook his head like an old warhorse demented with flies, followed her back up the stairs, turned off the cellar lights and sat down in the snug. The sprung door to the cellar closed automatically unless it was left propped open. Peg offered the wine and watched him screw off the top.
‘I reckon the old boy, William, kept the naughty stuff down there,’ he said. ‘Smugglers’ stuff. The best brandy. Probably collected that, too. Sodding collectors, they’re mad.’
She gazed at him. He needed a clean shirt. Then he changed the subject. ‘You know, Peg, if you learn to cook and clean, and maybe learn to drive, you can get a job anywhere.’
‘S’pose. How long have I got?’
‘As long as you like, if you keep your nose clean. You’re a great girl, you are.’
The subject was now herself and still she couldn’t tell him. He might stop approving of her and she could not bear the thought of that. Yeah, she was good, but she had a warrant on her head.
‘Do you like my hair?’ she said instead. ‘It was ever so cheap.’
‘You look terrific, girl. You really do.’
He got up and stoked the fire. The wind was howling round the place. She suddenly felt less safe and wanted to know more. She was hungry; Peg was always hungry and it was dark outside in the hinterland of the day. Days here were timeless. There was no timetable for eating. Jones started doing food, the sort of solid food she liked. He was peeling potatoes; she helped, clumsily, and listened. She had come to realise that he was better at talking when he was doing something with his hands.
‘I think someone followed me home,’ she said, trying to get his attention. ‘And your friend Monica recognised Di’s clothes on me. She’d have known where I came from. Who’s Quig?’
She told him what she had overheard. He listened and went red and she didn’t like that, either.
‘Bugger. Maybe that wasn’t such a good idea, getting a haircut. Still it does look nice. Look, girl. Things you oughta know. Di’s mother used to clean this place, first when it was a school, then when it wasn’t. Di came here with her mum. Di’s dad was as sly a bastard as ever lived, chip on the shoulder a mile high. Beat up mummy and kid, mum died of pneumonia after an operation, he went inside, kid runs free. Di’s dad? He could shoot a bird out of the sky when he was a boy and he could dig for England. He wouldn’t come near Di unless he caught her alone, he’d go by the back door, pick on someone close … Oh shit. Big bastards like that, they’re never short of work.’
She waited, disappointed. Not another rotten story about a rotten dad. It took the novelty and shock value out of what she wanted to tell Jones about her own life and her own excuses for being such trash. Jones stopped.
‘Another time, girl,’ he said, somehow understanding. ‘Another time. And there will be another time, promise. There’s a time for listening and a time for hearing, and if you want anyone to listen to you, you have to listen first. I’m like you; no one listens to me either, although they might, in time. You like garlic? Well
, you do now.’
Whatever he cooked smelled good to her.
‘What do you think of all these paintings and stuff?’ Jones asked her, as if really wanting her opinion, while keeping busy with food.
‘I think it’s a bit weird, to be honest, having so many,’ she said. ‘But I like it. Everywhere you go, something to look at. You could spend hours just looking, making up stories about them, forgetting where you were. Just looking.’
‘Entering another space,’ Jones said. ‘Looking at other worlds through someone else’s eyes. That’s the whole point. Thomas used to say you needed other peoples’ eyes as well as your own. Life was too short to learn enough, otherwise. Same for reading. Having the experience without having to do it, a shortcut. Learning about other lives. God, he did talk rot. But the idea is you come to a place like this, and you look, and you lose yourself. You learn something without thinking about it and you go away without realising you’ve forgotten your own snivelling little life for an hour or two.’
‘I can see that,’ Peg said, surprising herself. ‘I like the paintings of children the best. There’s a lot of those, aren’t there? Kids playing, kids doing stuff. I like the one of a bunch of kids playing in the sea.’
‘Yes,’ Jones said. ‘There’s plenty of kids in this collection, come to think of it. That was Thomas’s dad, the teacher. He collected pictures of children in particular. Some people found that suspicious.’
‘Why? Kids are beautiful. I love kids. I like looking at them. I’d rather look at a kid’s face in a painting than some fat old rich lady in a frock.’
Jones laughed. ‘You’re a tonic, Peg, really you are.’
She felt flattered, emboldened to continue. The wine was nice too, although she would have preferred vodka. It worked quicker.
‘Are there more paintings down that cellar?’
He nodded. ‘I reckon. They’ve been moving things round. I don’t want to know what until Di sees fit to tell me. Just wish it was more secure. God, will you listen to that wind?’
They listened. It was no more than a booming sound, comforting their safe seclusion. It would be noisier at the top of the house. Peg wondered about sleeping down here. She didn’t want to go to bed for a long while yet and where was the telly? The wind rose, with a shriek behind it.
‘It was a dark and stormy night,’ Jones began, using a dark, dramatic, rumbling voice, ‘and the captain said to the mate, Tell us a story, and the mate began … it was a dark and stormy night … And we’re all going to DROWN.’
‘Stoppit,’ she said, frightened. ‘Stoppit. Just STOP that.’
‘Sorry,’ he said, but he was no longer quite in the present. He was no longer in this small room. He was somewhere else. She noticed he had drunk most of the bottle.
‘Shall I tell you a proper story? Only you mustn’t tell anyone else.’
She nodded, not sure. ‘Just don’t tease me like that. It’s not fair.’
He nodded back. No, it wasn’t fair. The child wasn’t used to sounds like this, but he had to talk. He talked while he washed up the dishes, made it easier to think things through, funny how he needed an audience to think.
‘The first time Di came to this house was probably when she was a kid, came here with her mum. The first time she met Thomas was much later. She was in a gang. She was the smallest and mad as a snake long after her mum died. She got stuffed through the grille at the back with instructions to nick money if she could, but mainly to find car keys, so they could nick the car he had. Only, there was a tip-off, and she got caught. I was there, watching. It was a night just like this. Thomas didn’t want her arrested, but he had no choice. He kept saying, she saved me, she saved me, but he was delirious. He’d been hurt, but he swore it wasn’t her. He said the knife on the desk was his, but it wasn’t. Di always had a knife. She was taken away.’
He paused, shuddering like a dog shaking off water.
‘Then all hell broke loose, because the seafront flooded. People marooned in houses, waves crashing over the pier, cellars filling up with water. A nightmare night, like this might be, no it won’t, it hasn’t happened since. We had to go off and leave Thomas to it. We made the arrest, let the others go and fucked off. What a night that was. The High Street was under water, the Bank, too, and that was more important. So we left Thomas on his own.’
Peg lit him a cigarette, spellbound. No rules about smoking in here. The snug still smelled of Di’s cigars.
‘Which is why I never found out what really went on. Because there was someone else here that night. I know there was. Someone else who ran away and hid.’
‘One of the gang?’ Peg suggested, trying to be helpful. ‘Someone who came in with her?’
Not someone who ran away after, like she had done, from a place she’d trashed. Shame made her skin mottle.
‘Who knows? Maybe, but I don’t think so. I knew who most of them were. Thomas had rope burns round his wrists and marks round his neck. He tried to hide them and he did, from everyone else. Di hadn’t done that, she didn’t have a chance. I’m good on timings, I was there.’
He looked at her blearily, a long day, plus wine. Not used to it, preferred the steadier influence of beer. He regretted this talking, it wasn’t right to burden her, but still, he couldn’t stop.
‘I’ve been dying to get down that cellar ever since, never had the chance. Must have flooded that night, for sure. Everywhere did. Think I’ll have a coffee.’
The wind seemed to have eased, leaving a lull. Peg was interested, thinking all the same that old blokes were such fucking dreamers. Talking about things that happened before she was born and when she was what? Six years old? Why was everyone’s else’s life so much more interesting than hers? She thought of her baby brother, not seen in years.
Jones’s phone rang at the same moment that they heard the crash downstairs. They gazed at each other and failed to answer the phone.
‘Someone’s got in,’ Peg whispered.
Jones sprang to his feet: they looked towards the open cellar door, equally scared. Then, of common accord, and without a word, they went back down the steps to the warm part of the cellar where Saul and Di had shifted stuff only yesterday, part of some strange reorganisation they had conducted over two days, moving things from high to low. Di said they were putting things away until they found a place.
Creeping down, somehow expecting to find water although there had been none before, Peg was thinking of a film where people were trapped in the bottom of a boat, knocking against the hull. There was the same breathing sound, but no water and the same relative warmth, although markedly colder than the kitchen and the snug. In a room of once vast proportions, bigger than either of the rooms above, there was a small boy, sitting on a box, looking scared in the harsh light. He had kicked something over. The light glinted off his owlish spectacles. He looked like something out of a cartoon, so harmless in relation to the sound he had made that Peg almost laughed in relief.
‘Oh, shit,’ Jones said, stopped in his tracks.
The child stopped eating.
‘She wanted me to come,’ he shouted. ‘Grandpa wanted me to come. Someone wanted me to come, or they wouldn’t have left the chocolate.’
‘You silly little shit,’ Jones growled. ‘Don’t you know that Di leaves food for any bloody down and out who knows their way in here? It wasn’t fucking meant for you.’
The boy began to cry. Jones looked as if he was about to wring his neck, moving towards him threateningly. Peg elbowed him aside, saying shh, shhhh, squatted down on to her haunches to make herself the same size and held out her hand. He looked like one of the winsome children in one of the paintings she had liked best. Only a fucking lost kid with specs.
‘Hello, poppet,’ she said. ‘Who are you? You’re ever so welcome, but we weren’t expecting you. What’s your name?’
‘Patrick,’ he said.
Upstairs the phone rang on.
‘Oh shit,’ Jones said, again. ‘Now she�
��s really blown it.’
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Picture: Head and shoulders of a boy in silhouette, looking south through a window, framed by light. Looking at someone.
A washed out morning; a long night.
Here I am. It’s not my life, is it, Thomas, it’s always someone else’s. I don’t think you thought this would happen. Not part of the game.
Perhaps we shouldn’t play with other people’s lives.
It was never the plan to put a small one in danger. You would never have wanted that. Patrick drew a picture of my father, Thomas. He said Quig was waiting at the station. I followed instinct and came back.
I don’t know what my father wants: I don’t seriously think he wants me dead, but he wants a hold on me, and he could certainly get it through Patrick, the smaller target. Saul is very angry, because Patrick running away here again gives his parents extra ammunition against me and puts the master plan at risk. He’s angry too, that he didn’t know about Patrick’s earlier visits when you were ill, and he’s only slightly mollified when I say we were both implored to secrecy. Are there more of these secrets? he says, and how right he is to wonder.
I worry that Patrick could be a target for my father. He would always go for something he could hold to ransom: he would always shoot the smaller birds for practice. It hurts to send Patrick back so soon, but he has to go.
I wish you could tell me what to do. You said I’d know, but I’m not sure I do.
Di and Patrick sat at Thomas’s desk in the long gallery. The storm was long subsided and the day was clear and cold. Rain had washed the windows clean of salt, and the distant retreating sea was murmuring, no harm done. They were looking at Patrick’s sketchbook, Di alongside, entirely absorbed while Patrick sat in Thomas’s chair, as if he belonged.
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